Google Earth, launched six years ago, expanded by orders of magnitude the market for geospatial technologies. The initial 3D viewer was supplemented over time by driving directions, sky and flight simulator modes, street view, bathymetry, historical imagery, and other features. It evolved into a full-fledged enterprise mapping and GIS platform and was widely adopted across the geosciences and other scientific disciplines, as well as for a variety of business and government applications.

Now Google is productizing the processing infrastructure it has developed for Google Earth and Google Maps, together with the power of its massive server farms, by launching Google Earth Builder. The new platform, which it announced at the Where 2.0 conference in April and has scheduled for release in Q3 of this year, will make Google’s back-end geospatial capabilities available to enterprise users – business customers.

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